Project Eternity - Pets, Mod Support, Combat Answers

October 7th, 2012, 01:20

The 16th update for Project Eternity brings news of an optional pet for >$50 backers, some new high-end rewards and some possible light at the end of the mod tunnel:

Mod Support

From Neverwinter Nights 2 to Fallout: New Vegas, we've enjoyed supporting the mod community, and we are continuing that with Project Eternity. It is awesome to see how you extend the worlds we make.
To make getting mods easy, we are excited to announce that our friends at the Nexus will be the official spot to download Project Eternity mods once the game is released. They have been a great host for mods for our past games, and we want to continue the trend with the Project Eternity Nexus. Check out the Nexus Network at www.nexusmods.com.
Our plan is to release our file-format information and expose as much of the data in the game as possible for you to extend and edit. We traditionally do not "hard-code" numbers so that our designers, and you, have the power to easily change and iterate on RPG data. We also plan on releasing localization tools to let communities around the world create localized versions for languages we are not translating Project Eternity into.
As we get more familiar with Unity during production, we will be extending Project Eternity even more for mod makers. Look forward to announcements in the months ahead as we make further progress and can provide you with more information about tools and mod support.

Kaaaboom asks…Hi Tim! I'm curious how the close combat in P:E will turn out. Will the melee of P:E encompass stuff like reach weapons, opportunity attacks, flanking, grappling, charging, prone/standing-modes and so forth?

Yes, we are looking to include many of these features into our close combat system. Specifically, opportunity attacks and flanking are definitely in, as well as charging. We're not sure about reach weapons yet (we need to figure out if that attribute on a weapon will be worthwhile enough in combat and will supportable with the appropriate UI), and while we will support prone positions, you won't be able to attack while prone because the animations involved are too different from attacks while standing that we would have to make every animation twice, once for standing and once for prone. This limitation also means that grappling abilities will not be included. There are too many new animations needed and special case limitations that apply, e.g. how does a human grapple a centaur or a dragon or an ooze?).

Could you please provide a bit more detail on how skill/spell cooldowns are going to factor into the games combat system?

Sure, let me give some specifics on how we are planning to incorporate cooldowns into the wizard class. First off, cooldowns are NOT on individual spells. For any particular spell, you cast it, and when you are done, you can cast it again right away. But one limitation is on spells of a particular level. When you cast a certain number of those spells, in any combination, then the whole spell level group goes into a cooldown, and you can't use any of them until that cooldown has passed. That cooldown is long enough that for short battles, you are limited to casting a certain number of spells for each spell level. For long battles, that cooldown might expire and you can start casting those spells again.

The other cooldown has to do with your grimoire. A wizard may know a lot of spells, but he can only cast a few basic spells plus the ones that are in the grimoire that he is holding. Grimoires vary in size, holding various numbers of spells of different spell levels, and the player is free to load up his different grimoires with spell combinations of his choice. But once combat begins, switching grimoires causes a cooldown for all of those spells, leaving the caster only able to cast his basic spells until the grimoire cooldown passes. This means the player will have to think carefully about which spells he adds to a grimoire and under what situations he would want to switch one for another.

Colour me intrigued!

Also, fuck yeah, mod support. In Obsidian's case it might work as an excellent crowd-sourced QA.

Actually it all depends on how the pet is integrated into the game. Some games that have pets integrate them as an integral part of the game and some make it optional or totally useless. There are many single player rpgs that have very useful pets so depending on how they implement it will determine if I use it or not.

I really like how they are implementing magic and the first part is similar to a system I designed a long time ago.

PS. Please allow mods to be part of the original game along with separate adventures if you can.

Originally Posted by CountChocula
The only takeaway I got from that announcement is that they don't want to promise mod tools yet.

Modders don't need mod tools. There were none for KoTOR or the Infinity Engine games and that didn't stop people from adding content. Modders only need easy access to the game content, which is what Obsidian promised us here.

Actually, I think not having mod tools is a good thing. Too much commitment required, which mean only the dedicated modders will bother with it.

Also, if you feel like it, any Unity game can be "modded" by Unity (except that the Pro Version isn't free).

The spellcasting mechanics seem potentially neat and, AFAIR, something that wasnīt done exactly this way before.
Iīm not quite sure how they intend the grimoires to work, but it might be pretty cool if these would sometimes come with a prescribed unique spell which is not possible to learn on level ups.

Originally Posted by DeepO
Iīm not quite sure how they intend the grimoires to work, but it might be pretty cool if these would sometimes come with a prescribed unique spell which is not possible to learn on level ups.

I don't think Wizards will learn spells on level up. Josh Sawyer mentioned finding grimoires (on dead mages) with spells in them. His example was finding a girmoire with cloud kill in it, despite you not being able to use it yet.

Do you have a link?
For some reason I assumed (probably because I thought it might be interesting ) that learning a spell basically means learning to "insert" it into a grimoire, whereas what spell a mage can cast would be determined solely by what spells a grimoire contains.
Aka, playerīs mages would be able to customize grimoires with spells they know how to scribe, but some grimoires would come with an already prescribed spell that they would be able to cast too, even though they havenīt learned how to scribe it yet (either because itīs higher level, or, as Iīve already suggested, a spell thatīs totally exclusive to a grimoire).
Learning a scribing procedure on level ups (plus maybe some additional means, like a scroll or an NPC describing it) seemed like itīd go best with this (additional obvious assumption here is that learning the procedures from grimoires would not be possible).

Originally Posted by azarhal
His example was finding a girmoire with cloud kill in it, despite you not being able to use it yet.

This doesnīt necessarily sound mutually exclusive with the above load of assumptions .

Regardless, my sentiment basically was that itīd be cool if some of the grimoires would bring something unique to the table long-term and a unique spell exclusive to a grimoire was the first thing that came to mind. Obviously there could be some other ways how to achieve this like, for example, some grimoires would make spells of certain school (or element) stronger, but would hold lesser amount of spells, etc.

Originally Posted by azarhal
Modders don't need mod tools. There were none for KoTOR or the Infinity Engine games and that didn't stop people from adding content. Modders only need easy access to the game content, which is what Obsidian promised us here.

Actually, I think not having mod tools is a good thing. Too much commitment required, which mean only the dedicated modders will bother with it.

Also, if you feel like it, any Unity game can be "modded" by Unity (except that the Pro Version isn't free).

The games with officially supported mod tools have so many more mods, and much better mods.

They also have 3000 "remakes" of Eye of the Beholder made by people who can't produce art, write scripts or do anything but draw the map in the editor. Not that I'm against mod tools! I'm all for 'em. Access to the game content is already good, though!

Anyhow. I'm sure that since everyone's using Unity, they'll be chatting it up through all this and we'll probably end up with mod tools that are functionally very similar for most of the games.

Originally Posted by azarhal
Yeah, not necessarily mutually exclusive. As for the link, it is on the SomethingAwful forums, here.

Thanks!
That actually sounds potentially fairly close to what I was imagining, but since apparently the grimoire thing is not set in stone yet, who knows where the specifics will spin it to
in the end .

Originally Posted by azarhal
He also gave an example of the cooldown system on his formspring.

Thatīs how I understood itīll work from Cainīs update and I think it has potential.
Both the cooldown implementation and the grimoire stuff seem like a quite fresh take on things.

Originally Posted by CountChocula
The games with officially supported mod tools have so many more mods, and much better mods.

Companies that release games with official tools (TES, NWN) spend a lot of developer resources on it and they designed it with mods in mind. Unless this project reaches well over $3MM I dont expect a construction kit.

What I hate is when the only tool released is a level editor. Witcher, Fallout 1&2 fell into this this territory initially and there were virtually no mods.

My experience is a majority of mods people want are retextures, parameter/script tweaks, and community bug fixes. The next level is new content by adding static models like weapons then animated items like armor and then you get into custom animation/creatures which are years away from initial release.

In that mix is custom houses, quests and what not but usually that takes years to get released properly event when tools are available on release. After that is stuff like MMM, OOO, Nehrim which are basically new games and require extensive tools.

I think they can satisfy the community with releasing file format documentation, script compiler, script source, a skeleton rig for blender,max or maya and an exporter. The more source released the better but the community can reverse engineer (with some amount of blessing) from the documentation in many cases. Even Bethesda did not release skeletons or modeling support tools and people had to use community tools or the Civ4 Tools.

My understanding is Unity will not support the last three at all and is up to the developer to release tools. Perhaps with Unity Pro but I didn't get a sense that was a really good solution. Anyway if they stagger tools so that simple mods like scripting, retextures, custom weapons/armor are possible initially and then a level editor after at least I would be happy. I just don't see a construction kit being done initially though. Maybe another kickstarter? Of course its chicken and egg, if they do it up front then it helps them as well I suspect.